Good job, @uni0, on defending the Uniswap governance.
- Fundamentally, there is no reason to lower the quorum threshold.
You already only need 21% of the current supply to vote yes - and it will come down to 4% eventually.
I don’t think that many voting decisions need to be passed during the first few months of Uniswap governance. We simply don’t have the safety practices in place yet. No teams to develop proposals, no audit teams to verify that the proposals are solid.
- When it comes to the Dharma & Gauntlet group of interest, we can identify a couple of things about them.
The goal: they want to get another UNI airdrop.
a) When it comes to UNI airdrop itself, I see no reason for it to be done. It is somewhat clear now that airdropping UNI is not an efficient way to build the community to govern the protocol. There are a lot of better ways.
Just think about it: 251k addresses received free UNI, and most topics on the governance forum don’t reach 1k views.
b) How much UNI do they want to get airdropped on them exactly?
If they already have 30m votes, how much more will they gain from this airdrop?
What percentage of the supply do we find reasonable for this group of interest to have?
Keep in mind that it’s much easier to act as a single entity.
You could view one vote from a single entity as 2 or 3 votes from not mobilized voters.
So, Dharma & Gauntlet group of interest want to:
- Lower the quorum so that they can reach it without community support. Lowering the quorum is harmful to the protocol in its early governance stages.
- Effectively send themselves the UNI from the governance treasury, which in turn means giving themselves more voting rights.
The method: delegates use deceptive tactics.
- The rider problem has been mentioned a lot here already.
- The justification for lowering the quorum threshold is highly speculative. The analysis is made in a way that would fit the desired outcome.
Let’s take a close look at this post. It looks smart. All that code in it makes it look nifty. The code is not understood by most people who read it, but it creates a reputational signal. There’s code, graphs, Nansen, PGP signatures. But there is no essence to it.
Creating a model based on the assumption that Binance will always have 25m UNI tokens just doesn’t make sense.
And there is no disclosure in this post of how the proposed changes benefit the Dharma & Gauntlet group of interest.
The real analysis of the implications of lowering the quorum threshold would be about how it would feed into Dharma & Gauntle’s ability to distribute the governance treasury towards themselves. That is a much more real and apparent issue.
And make no mistake, by “themselves,” I mean the whole group of interest and not just its representatives. This group has an interest in getting free UNI. And by getting free UNI, it will get more control over governance decisions in the future.
I’m not sure why anyone other than people who directly benefit from it would ever get behind this proposal.
I also don’t see the value in distributing UNI towards the group that wants to distribute free UNI towards itself.
How exactly can an increase in this group’s voting power benefit the Uniswap protocol’s development?
If these goals and this method don’t qualify this group of interest as a bad actor, what does?
a) They want to have quorum without even a slight support of the rest of the Uniswap community. And it happens in the time when the governance is at its most vulnerable point.
b) They want to distribute UNI from the governance treasury towards themselves for free at the expense of everyone else.